Imagine if your alarm clock was powered by gas or coal or nuclear energy. Surprise! It is!
Nissan has a new ad campaign: Gas Powered Everything. The concept makes for amusing visuals as people start up their computers, hair driers, coffee makers, microwaves and whatnot with lawn mower-style pull cords. Smoke belches out as the combustion engines, which would normally run cleanly with the flip of a switch, power formerly electric devices with petroleum.
“Imagine if everything in your life ran on gas, from your alarm clock to your computer and even your cell phone,” says the YouTube description of the ad. Unfortunately, or fortunately, depending on your perspective, everything does run on gas (or coal or nuclear energy), from my alarm clock to my computer and my cell phone! Even Nissan’s damn car runs on gas, though not directly.
America’s current power grid is run by three primary sources of fuel: Coal (45 percent), natural gas (20 percent) and nuclear (20 percent). In other words, electricity is not generated by electricity. It’s generated mostly by the Big Three of energy horrors that the environmental left would like us to dispense with so we can all live in grass huts and ride bikes everywhere.
You may as well fire up your alarm clock with a combustion engine because there’s a combustion engine somewhere that feeds a line into your home to fire that puppy up. But I suppose Nissan’s ad agency is betting that most Americans are ignorant of how electricity is actually generated.
I won’t even get into the unintended environmental consequences of manufacturing and disposing of these toxic battery-run vehicles, and that over the span of their lives they leave a larger carbon footprint.
The tag for the Nissan Leaf (the car’s name is another sign of the Apocalypse) is Innovation for the Planet. Which planet they refer to, I’m not sure, but it sure as hell isn’t this planet, a planet awash in fuels they claim are not used to power this car though they actually are.
Increasingly, it seems, the job of our nation’s ad agencies is to peddle and perpetuate urban legends, myths and half-truths so that corporations like Nissan can pat themselves on the back for being so “responsible” and “progressive.”
The Crisis Lobby: The Obama administration’s mantra – never let a crisis go to waste – has turned the normal news cycle into an Orwellian nightmare. Now, whenever anything bad or seemingly bad happens, we’re faced with some new federal regulation, tax, bureaucratic agency, or all of the above, to respond to the “crisis” and prevent its ever happening again. Take the Gulf oil spill… Instead of putting every effort into capping and cleaning the spill, the Obama administration put most of its energy into denouncing the oil industry and placing a moratorium on future deep water offshore drilling. Why are we drilling so far offshore in the first place? It might just be all the environmental restrictions that don’t allow us to drill closer to shore, in other areas up and down America’s coast or in ANWAR. So it’s ironic that “saving the environment” actually destroyed it, but that’s how unintended consequences work. The Unintended Consequences Factor ratchets up exponentially when the federal government strays farther and farther from its limited Constitutional mission. So when you hear a lot of bad news about obesity, be afraid. Be very afraid.
Dueling bumper stickers: I was driving to Target the other day to partake in some rampant consumerism. Before I did my little part in destroying the planet, I noticed a car with two bumper stickers. One read, “Obama ’08,” the other, “I love my country but fear my government.” This puzzled me, because if one fears their government, is it prudent vote for the candidate who promises more of it? The problem with voting for more government is that, eventually, some right-wing fascist will be in power and abuse the hell out of the behemoth you helped create in the first place by voting for big-government guy (or gal). George W. Bush, for instance, would have been less likely to constantly violate our rights had the federal government been limited to begin with. It’s not a good idea to create an infrastructure that allows the next Hitler unfettered access to almost unlimited power.
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